On July 9, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi composed a puff piece to honor Stephen Colbert, “fake news” commentator and satirical fake conservative. It turns out Colbert is becoming an “obsession in academia,” with a new collegiate submersion in “Truthinessology.”
Let us agree that he can be very funny. Let’s also agree that his satire being taken seriously by academia says something about the state of academia.
It also says something about those in the press who agree. Farhi winked in his story that this obsession is a problem, but then unfurled a long list of academic tributes. Parents are now paying tens of thousands of dollars each year for their children to skateboard around boring old Aristotle and Locke and instead immerse themselves in the study of smirking liberal TV wise-crackers.
Colbert, we are told, is a television icon already, like CBS legend Edward R. Murrow. This would be more upsetting if Murrow weren’t in reality one partisan hack in a long line of truth-mangling CBS News partisan hacks.
Professor Geoffrey Baym proclaimed, “I’m sure there are still a lot more books out there on CBS News and Edward R. Murrow, but you could argue that the emergence of satire news at this level is an important phenomenon that I don’t think we still completely understand.” Baym wrote a book titled “From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News.”
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